


Life in Death

by rannadylin



Series: Ianthina and Glynis [2]
Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Loss of Parent(s), Mentor/Protégé, Origin Story, Priests, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 20:16:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21021647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rannadylin/pseuds/rannadylin
Summary: Ianthina's brush with death brings her to the god of it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LunaRowena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaRowena/gifts).

> For the "Dum spiro, spero (While I breathe, I hope) prompt requested by LunaRowena for Fictober!

Two travelers brought their horses to a halt at the village square, surveying the destruction around them. The first, a tall aumaua with sharp eyes and restless hands twitching to take up the reins again, scoffed in dismissal. “No one here to preach to. We’d best move on to the next town.”

The second, a dwarf sitting so still atop his horse the pair resembled the sort of commemorative statue oft found in such a square, did not look to his companion. “Go on if you wish. I shall tend to the dead.”

“If you find anything left to tend to. Local beasts likely got to them first. Or the smart ones saw the twister coming and took to the hills for safety.”

The dwarf gave a minute shrug. “Then I shall commend their souls to Berath, at the least.” 

He descended from his mount, pausing only to tie the horse off to what remained of a fence at the edge of the square, and made his slow, purposeful way toward the ruin that appeared most stable. His companion scoffed again. “Fine, then. My work, at least, is done here. Berath can have your dead; I’m off to recruit  _ living _ souls for Magran.”


	2. Chapter 2

The dwarf made no rush to complete his work here. The departed souls would find their way to Berath’s care with or without him, in their own time, and the husks they had left behind would still be there by the time he got to them -- if, in fact, his companion had not been right about the beasts. One by one, he came across those who had not been fortunate enough to run for the hills: crushed by the fall of a wall, suffocated under rubble that it took him hours to clear out to get to the bodies, slammed by the twister’s force against a tree at a fatal angle. One by one, he dragged the dead out to the village square, laying them out in a row while his placid horse kept guard.

So the day progressed, with a brief pause when dwarf and horse took food before he returned again to his grisly work. The row of bodies grew, but not by so much: many, he judged, had indeed taken refuge from the storm, spared by Berath’s grace from a death before their time. 

The sun was setting when he ventured into a ruin of what looked to have once been a fairly elegant house. The upper story was entirely collapsed, along with the northern and eastern sides of the lower story, but the corner opposite that rubble had been spared. Starting there, with an invocation on his lips to guide him to the places where souls had recently met his god, he made his way through the parts of the house he could navigate.

Just ahead, his prayer directed him to a collapsed interior wall. He saw there a crumpled form, female, elven, wearing a dress of what seemed a fine material beneath all the dust. Her arm stretched out toward the rubble of the wall: he followed the line of it and saw that her fingertips just brushed against those of another, a body trapped beneath the wall’s collapse. The dwarf paused to utter a prayer for the souls that met their end here, parted by the wall and soon to be parted in the Beyond, and then bent to collect the elf’s body before tackling the rubble to get to the second one.

But she, alone of the bodies he had found in this twister’s wake, stirred. At his touch she drew breath, twitching away. He recoiled in surprise, then stood watching, barely breathing. 

She seemed not to see him at first, or not to register his presence, but her eyes upon opening turned toward the rubble and the body beneath it. Slowly, silently, she dragged herself forward toward the fallen wall, grasping at the stones, struggling to shift them.

The dwarf stepped forward again, reaching not for her but for the rubble. “Don’t you worry, lass,” he said. “We’ll get that one out.”

Only then did she take note of him. She turned shrewd, grey eyes on him -- wide now with surprise and fear, but quickly narrowed as she sized him up. “Not to worry,” he said again. As he began to shift the rubble, stone by stone, she watched, hovering nearby. And then she quietly joined the work, her expression drawn tight and eyes fixed on the task before her whenever he glanced her way. She worked faster than he did, with an intensity he thought born of desperation. Once or twice he saw her bottom lip tremble, her eyes drift to the body they were freeing, but she never spoke. So he left her to her work, and they worked in silence, apart from his occasional instructions to point out which part of the rubble could safely be shifted next.

By the time they freed the body whose hand he had found the girl reaching for, it was dark outside. But as the dwarf carefully began to drag the crumpled corpse -- another elf, older -- toward the square, the girl did not follow as he expected, but continued urgently shifting the rubble. He watched a moment, wondering if the trauma had made her fixate upon this one task. But then, peering at the rubble she was moving, he felt the tug of a divine sense, like the faint chime of a bell, and understood. He returned to her aid. Together they slowly uncovered one more body and carried it to lie beside the first. Both elves; a man and a woman. The dwarf studied the corpses, then studied the near-corpse who stood beside him, her eyes now brimming with tears, her features recognizably like theirs, and understood.

“They’re gone, lass,” he said gently. “Their souls are in Berath’s care now, but I’ll tend to what’s left of them here. It’s all right to weep. You’ve had a rough day.”

Then he busied himself out in the dark square for a time, preparing a pyre from the lumber of shattered houses, arranging the other bodies on it, speaking quietly to his horse. When all else was ready and he returned to the last two corpses, their surviving daughter had dried her tears and stared at him with determination, but without a word.

So he nodded and began to drag the father-corpse out to join the others. After a moment, she caught up and bent to help him, her lips pinched with that same determination. Together they finished off the pyre with these last two of the village’s dead. She stood silently by while he spoke the invocation, commending these souls to Berath, to a safe journey through the Beyond, to a blessed return to life on their next turn of the Wheel. He lit the pyre, at the point in the prayers that called for it, and saw her tense, bowing her head over her arms wrapped tightly around herself. So he added a prayer of his own, when the prayers for the dead were done: a prayer for the living, thanking Berath for the life spared, as the god willed it; asking his god’s blessing for the life this soul had yet to live.

And then he sat, watching the fire that burned throughout the night, the final chapter in this turn of the Wheel for the souls claimed by Berath in this storm. She sat by him, at first staring likewise at the fire while he muttered quiet prayers for the dead. Some hours into the wake, sleep claimed her. In her sleep she leaned against him and did not bristle when he wrapped her in his cloak, though the heat of the funeral pyre was really sufficient for the night.

In the morning she readily ate the food he offered her. The storm-tossed village, in the light of dawn and the dying pyre, looked even more grim, but he was relieved to see her eating like one who embraced the life that Berath yet entrusted to her. 

His work in this village complete, the dwarf at last packed his saddlebags, mounted his horse, and then turned to offer a hand to the elven girl, who watched him uncertainly. “I must go on to the next town,” he said. “The horse can carry two, if you wish. We’ll find you someplace safe to stay.”

She hesitated, assessing the horse -- and him -- carefully for a long moment. But at last she accepted his hand, climbing up behind him, and they left behind her ruined home.


	3. Chapter 3

“I’m Wend, by the way,” the dwarf told her as they traveled. She listened, but made no answer. No need for a name, after all, he thought; I’m just seeing her safe to the next town. 

But at the next town, as he went about his business, telling the people of Berath and their responsibility for souls passing from one life to the next, the girl did not leave his side. He took rooms in the inn for them both and talked the innkeeper into letting her earn a bit of coin washing dishes, which she did reliably despite never saying a word. He took her to a shop to acquire a change or two of clothing and the other sort of sundries left behind in the rubble of her village, but even with this means of independence acquired she still stuck close to him. She sat by silently, her quiet and calculating stare disturbing and occasionally infuriating his Magranite colleague when they reunited over dinner at the inn to exchange reports of their missionary efforts since parting ways.

And at night, she took the rough mattress from her room and dragged it into his adjoining room, silently making her bed at the foot of his. At first he thought this odd, till he recalled that the storm that must have brought the twister had passed during the night, while he and his priestly colleague camped in the hills nearby, just near enough to see the clouds gathering over the village next on their route. He thought of how she flinched whenever the two of them climbed the stairs to their upper-story rooms. And he let her do what she must.


	4. Chapter 4

One night, after weeks during which the faith of Magran spread like, appropriately, wildfire, while Wend slowly but surely gathered those townsfolk more prepared to face their inevitable end than yearning to prove themselves in adversity, the girl woke in the night with a gasp. Wend sat up and peered over the edge of his bed. She looked back at him, wide-eyed with the glassy stare of one still waking, and spoke with a voice torn between hope and disbelief, raw from disuse: “Papa?”

He froze at first, blinking in surprise at hearing her voice for the first time, then quietly, regretfully, said, “No, lass.” And then she burst out weeping. 

He got out of bed and sat by her, unable to offer words of comfort or improve reality for her, able only to ensure that she need not grieve alone. Hours passed. The sun rose eventually. In Eothas’ light her tears at last ran out. “There, now,” said Wend, awkwardly patting her shoulder. 

She sniffed, wiped her eyes on a sleeve long since drenched, and said in a voice still more raw now from the weeping, “Thank you. For...taking me from there.”

“Couldn’t rightly leave you there with no means of survival,” he said. “Not when Berath saw fit to spare you in the storm.”

She studied him shrewdly, as the trailing sniffles subsided. “My parents,” she asked quietly. “Berath took them?”

“Aye, lass,” he said. “As they take charge of every soul at life’s end. Berath will see your parents safely to their next lives.”

She nodded. She frowned. “Was it...because they did something wrong? In the village, we never heard of Berath, or your friend’s Magran. We worshiped other gods. Not that they remembered us in the storm,” she added, a wry and bitter tone smoothing out the rawness of her voice. “Did this make Berath angry?”

“Oh, no. It’s not like that, lass,” he said, with a chuckle that drew a sharper look from her red-swollen eyes. “Berath would take exception if someone tried to cheat death -- to extend a life beyond what our bodies are meant to withstand. Ordinary deaths -- even those as unfortunate as your parents’ -- there can be many a cause for those. Sometimes, even, the gods’ workings of plans beyond our understanding. But this…” he stood and began to pace as was his custom when delivering sermons. At one point, passing back and forth, he caught sight of her lips upturned ever so slightly: she had seen enough of his sermons in recent days to recognize the habit. “This disaster that befell your village, your parents, I doubt it’s any such grand scheme. The gods are eager for kith hereabouts to know of them, not to bear punishment for their former unbelief. Even so...there is always a measure of Death in Life, even as there is Life in Death, lass. All lives, however long, ultimately come to the same end. Merely living bears risk, and sometimes one’s luck runs out.” He stood still and turned to face her. “And sometimes...it does not. Your parents are not to blame for their death, but I think my god had an interest in your survival.”

She lowered her gaze, clasping her hands together so tightly the knuckles whitened, for a long, silent moment. When she spoke again, her voice was steadier than before. “I thought I was dead, too,” she began. “I was running to my mother when the wall fell. Something in the winds hit me, and that was the last I knew. For a while.” She looked up. “I...dreamed, I suppose. I thought I was dead, that I was about to face Inas -- She who judges the dead for the value of their life, as my people taught.” Wend nodded; he had heard the name before, traveling this part of Eora. The girl continued, “But I didn’t see her. I saw...a man, I think. Guarding a door. Very gaunt; I thought he was a skeleton walking, at first. And I never got a very clear look at him, either, so maybe he was. But he was certainly not Inas,” she said, wry again. “I was moving toward the door, but he stopped me. Just...put up a hand and shook his head, and I couldn’t go on. Then...then I heard bells, I think. And then I woke up, and saw Mama...and...and you were there.” She sniffled as if the tears would return, but a moment passed and she regained control. 

Wend nodded and whistled slowly. “You saw the Usher -- a manifestation of my god; he who guides the way to death and the life beyond. I would call that more than a dream, lass. Berath indeed took note of you.”

She took a deep breath, unclenching her hands. “Did...did my parents see him too?”

Wend tilted his head, studying her. “Aye, lass. I believe they did. And he guided their souls on in peace.”

“But sent me back.” She sighed. “Very well, then. I wish to go with you.”

He blinked. “With me?” 

“You can teach me of Berath, yes? I wish to understand why I was spared. And I wish to serve.” Her voice grew firmer as she spoke, with that determination he had seen in her in their first moments together.

“Well, now.” He raised an eyebrow. “I can teach you, aye, the basics at least. Such is my profession,” he chuckled. “But if you wish to serve...to enter holy orders?” She nodded without hesitation. “Well, that might be beyond the likes of me. My missionary circuit lasts yet five months more. Travel with me, if you want, and I’ll teach you all I can. And when I return to temple, I shall present you to Berath’s high priest as a candidate for training, if you still wish it then.”

“I do,” she said, and for the first time the curve of her lips reached a full smile. “Thank you, Wend.”

“Well, then,” he said. “Go and get ready for the day. You’ll come with me on today’s rounds.”

She nodded and got up quickly, gathering her mattress and hurrying toward her own, little-used room. At the door she looked back, still smiling. “Thank you, Wend,” she said again. “And -- I’m called Ianthina. I’m sorry I...didn’t tell you before.”

“Ianthina,” Wend smiled. “Not to worry. You’ve told me all that was needed, even before you spoke.”


End file.
